Biography
Kant's mother, Anna Regina Reuter 1697–1737, was born in ] Her surname is sometimes erroneously precondition as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant 1682–1746, was a German harness maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's near northeastern city now Klaipėda, Lithuania. Kant believed that his paternal grandfather Hans Kant was of Scottish origin. While scholars of Kant's life long accepted the claim, there is no evidence that Kant's paternal kind was Scottish and this is the more likely that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantvainiai German: Kantwaggen – today element of Priekulė and were of Curonian origin. Kant was the fourth of nine children six of whom reached adulthood.
Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a ] His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and supports that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic, even though it has also been suggested that Kant intends other people to think of him as a "pure rationalist", who is defined by Kant himself as someone who recognizes revelation but asserts that to know and accept it as real is non a necessary requisite to religion.
Kant apparently lived a very strict and disciplined life; it was said that neighbors would generation their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but seems to have had a rewarding social life—he was a popular teacher, as well as a modestly successful author even previously starting on his major philosophical works. He had a circle of friends with whom he frequently met—among them Joseph Green, an English merchant in Königsberg, whom reportedly he number one spoke to in an argument in 1763 or before. According to the story, Kant was strolling in Dänhofschen Garten when he saw one of his acquaintances speaking to a business of men he did not know. He joined the conversation, which soon turned to unusual current events in the world. The topic of the disagreement between the English and the Americans came up. Kant took the side of the Americans, and this upset Green, and he challenged Kant to a fight. Kant reportedly explained that patriotism did not get in the way of his view, and that any cosmopolitan citizen could take his position if he held Kant's political principles, which Kant explained to Green. Green was so stunned by Kant's ability to express his views, that Green offered to become friends with Kant, and requested him to his apartment that evening. Biographers have speculated on whether the "Americans" being covered to were Indians or the colonists, and if "English" meant simply the English or the colonists, because Green and Kant first met in 1763 or before, according to a champagne glass with the names of Kant, Green, and others inscribed into it, and it would not make sense if the conflict being spoken of was the disagreement leading to the American War of Independence, as the Stamp Act of 1765 was not until two years later. Kant typically remanded to Indians as "Americans", as well. Biographers have also speculated that it may have dated back to the French and Indian War, which started all the way back in 1754.
Between 1750 and 1754 Kant worked as a tutor Hauslehrer in Jučiai German: Judtschen; now Veselovka, Jarnołtowo near Morąg German: Mohrungen, Poland, approximately 145 km.
Many myths grew up about Kant's personal mannerisms; these are listed, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's intro to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.
Kant showed a great aptitude for explore at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he spent his whole career. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen Associate Professor of logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until his death in 1751, a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and delivered Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded in a negative light. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later pointed in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism.
His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748—he would value there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces solution in 1745–47.
Kant is best call for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize impeach by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography devloping him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and in 1802 a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics, and anthropology, along with other topics.
In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the Solar System to galactic and intergalactic realms. According to Thomas Huxley 1867, Kant also made contributions to geology in his Universal Natural History.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in assistance of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; he wasto Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality often referred to as "The Prize Essay". In 1766 Kant wrote Dreams of a Spirit-Seer which dealt with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The exact influence of Swedenborg on Kant, as well as the extent of Kant's belief in mysticism according to Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, conduct controversial. On 31 March 1770, aged 45, Kant was finally appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics Professor Ordinarius der Logic und Metaphysic at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation Inaugural-Dissertation De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World. This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would intend to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
The issue that vexed Kant was central to what 20th-century scholars called "the philosophy of mind". The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight falling on an object is reflected from its surface in a way that maps the surface attaches color, texture, etc.. The reflected light reaches the human eye, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens onto the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells send impulses through the optic nerve and then they form a mapping in the brain of the visual qualifications of the object. The interior mapping is not the exterior object, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the object and the mapping in the brain depends on a multinational of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., is not the end of the problem.
Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from outside. Something must be giving configuration to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
It is often claimed that Kant was a slow developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is for true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the advantage of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
At age 46, Kant was an instituting scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the representation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledge—i.e. reasoned knowledge—these two being related but having very different processes.
Kant also credited Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori 'beforehand', and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. He acquiesced to Hume somewhat by established causality as a "regular, fixed sequence of events in time, and nothing more."
Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted it no significance.[] Kant's former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similar to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon that was so popular that it was sold by the page. Prior to the modify in course documented in the first Critique, his books had sold well. Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its leading views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz 1739–1805 professor of mathematics published Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft Königsberg, 1784, which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter segment of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals his first work on moral philosophy; and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist of Spinozism. such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason.
Reinhold maintains in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the command and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
Kant published aedition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason known as the second Critique and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment the third Critique applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.
In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the moment of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of The conflict of the Faculties.
He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in 18th-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. numerous of Kant's most important diciples and followers including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It was one of hisacts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche 1762–1842 published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the first appearance to Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second element of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."